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The Master's Artist is a group blog for writers united by the blood of Christ and a love for language. We come from different backgrounds, have different theological outlooks, and are interested in a wide variety of genres and artforms. The opinions expressed belong to their authors alone -- and you're welcome to share yours.

May 02, 2012

The Poems of R.S. Thomas, Welshman

It’s rather jarring to be reading poems about Welsh farmers and the Welsh landscape and come across one entitled “The Peasant.” Or find a rather unsympathetic and critical eye when you’re expecting something more akin to a romanticized view.

And yet, there is love here, and kindness, and an understanding of the people who populate these poems. There’s a kind of protective fierceness here, too, the shepherd watching over his flock even if the flock doesn’t realize it needs protecting.

I’ve been reading the Collected Poems 1945-1990 of R.S. Thomas (1913-2000), Anglican clergyman, Welsh nationalist, neo-Luddite (he didn’t like any of the modern conveniences, like vacuum cleaners), and poet. I read a shorter, “everyday poems” version first, and then turned to the Collected Poems. Rarely have I been so moved by what at first glance seems more like pastoral poetry but soon becomes a kind of love song to rural life and its people.

Thomas was born in Cardiff, Wales, and ordained in the Church in Wales. He married in 1940 and he and his wife Mildred had one son. He began publishing poetry in 1945, and achieved literary and critical notice with his fourth book, Song of the Year’s Turning, which included an introduction by poet John Betjeman, who would eventually become a poet laureate. Thomas was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1996 but the award went to Seamus Heaney. (Heaney would speak at Thomas’s funeral service in Westminster Abbey in 2000.)

Thomas’s love and regard for the people he ministered to have a kind of stark bleakness to them, but they are there nonetheless. Consider his poem “Evans:”

Evans? Yes, many a timeI came down his bare flightOf stairs into the gaunt kitchenWith its wood fire, where crickets sangAccompaniment to the black kettle’sWhine, and so into the coldDark to smother in the thick tideOf night that drifted about the wallsOf his stark farm on the hill ridge.

It was not the dark filling my eyesAnd mouth that appalled me; not even the dripOf rain like blood from the one treeWeather-tortured. It was the darkSilting the veins of that sick manI left stranded upon the vastAnd lonely shore of his bleak bed.

This understanding of the reality of daily life extends to the group he knew especially well, because he was a member of it – the country clergy, quietly serving far from the excitement of the cities and the politics of the church. From “The Country Clergy," the poem that is likely my favorite in the whole collection:

I see them working in old rectoriesBy the sun’s light, by candlelight,Venerable men, their black clothA little dusty, a little greenWith holy mildew. And yet their skulls,Ripening over so many prayers,Toppled into the same graveWith oafs and yokels. They left no books,Memorial to their lonely thoughtIn grey parishes; rather they wroteOn men’s hearts and in the mindsOf young children sublime wordsToo soon forgotten. God in his timeOr out of time will correct this.

Thomas writes of farming and the landscape; of Welsh history and the church. And individual people – men and women, old and young. Very little escapes his eye, or his heart.

He even writes of poets and poetry, and I can almost picture him imagining his own end in “Death of a Poet” that includes several subtle references to death in the first stanza:

Laid now on his smooth bedFor the last time, watching dullyThrough heavy eyelids the day’s colourWidow the sky, what can he sayWorthy of record, the books all open,Pens ready, the faces, sad,Waiting gravely for the tired lipsTo move once – what can he say?

His tongue wrestles to force one wordPast the thick phlegm; no speech, no phrasesFor the day’s news, just the one word ‘sorry’;Sorry for the lies, for the long failureIn the poet’s war; that he preferredThe easier rhythms of the heartTo the mind’s scansion; that he now diesIntestate, having nothing to leaveBut a few songs, cold as stonesIn the thin hands that asked for bread.